


Baltic

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: Young Avengers
Genre: Boarding School, Crack, Crossdressing, F/M, Fluff, Gen, High School
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 13:33:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/927058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate goes to boarding school, and the boys are morons about it. (pre-Children's Crusade)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baltic

“You’re going _where_?”

“The Academy of the Holy Family.” Kate tries not to sound too miserable, but she knows she can’t help it. 

Teddy thumbs through the brochure that Kate brought along, looking at the pictures of demure young women smiling and playing polo and going to mass in uniform. “This school is in Baltic, Kate. You know what’s in Baltic? A cotton mill.” 

“How do you even know that?” Billy asks, distracted for a moment from the sheer panic that was on his face a minute before. The panic comes back (it always does) and he looks at Kate. “You’d leave us for Baltic?”

This isn’t going anything like Kate imagined – of course she had pictured them stoically taking the news and enduring it with some modicum of grace, but then, the only one of the team who isn’t away at Initiative Camp who is capable of anything approaching grace is Teddy, who is still thumbing through the brochure like he can find a loophole in there somewhere. He can’t. Kate knows.

Kate’s tried.

“I’m not _leaving_ , not by choice, anyway. My dad freaked out and he’s sending me. Billy, stop looking at me that way, I feel like I kicked your puppy or something.” 

“I’m very practiced at Jewish Guilt, Kate.”

“Well I’m Catholic, I’m immune.” Kate sighs. “Look, I have to go, the driver is under orders to let me stay exactly ten minutes before he comes in and carries me home.” She sighs. “I’ll email you guys once I get settled, okay?”

Eli hasn’t said a word the entire meeting, and Tommy looks like he’d rather chew off his own hands than sit still another second, but they all watch her as she walks back to the car. 

This is going to be a disaster.

 

To be perfectly fair about it, this mess was brewing long before Kate broke her arm. It took her father six months to wake up to the fact that his daughter was an unregistered superhero, despite the fact that Tony Stark came to his office on _more than one occasion_ to let him know just that. To be fair, a huge publishing merger was going on at the time, and Kate was pretty sure that anything short of pregnancy out of wedlock wasn’t going to get his attention.

But once his attention had turned back from the world of high-end business deals, the protestations began. Carefully, naturally, because he knew that outright forbidding Kate to do it would result in her sneaking out becoming more and more manipulatively clever, and considering one of her best friends was a reality-bending witch, that was saying a lot.

So the protestations kept getting louder, but then last week Kate misjudged the height of the bridge that the bad guy jumped off to take off through Central Park (or maybe she just misjudged the angle, she hasn’t gotten a chance to go back and actually look at what happened) and she ended up with a broken arm from landing badly. 

Eli, being Eli, forbade Billy from patching her up because _your healing spells never work out right!_ and Teddy called an ambulance, Billy conjured them up into ‘hanging out in the park clothes,’ and Tommy held her head and made snide remarks about Eli.

Kate had never missed Cassie quite so much.

Once they finished bandaging her arm and forbidding her from anymore extreme sports, her father apparently contacted her mother’s alma mater and arranged for the transfer, had the maid pack her things, and told her not twenty minutes ago to be ready in thirty to leave the City.

Kate should have seen it coming.

 

Actually, what she really should have seen coming is that she really kind of likes the school. After the tedious three hours in the car (her father was, as usual, missing, but her sister was there to provide a cheerful parental lecture about hanging out with boys and also dangerous stunts and the risk of pregnancy in girls who spend too much time doing both) she would probably like a root canal, but when she gets out of the car and to her room, she finds out it’s actually…kind of pretty. 

Her roommate isn’t there when she gets there but by the posters of Cap’ and the Avengers (and even one of…holy cow, that _is_ Eli, how did she get a poster of him?) she’s at least got someone who will remind her of the boys.

She drops them a text ( _hey guys, here and alive, don’t do anything drastic_ ) and dumps her phone before going on the official tour of the school, presented by Sister Mary Catherine, who stresses the ‘community service’ aspect of things, and shows Kate the orchestra room proudly, telling her that, “We heard you played the cello. Once your cast comes off, maybe you’ll want to play with us? I’m head of the music department, and we’re always lacking in cello players.” She sounds so earnest that Kate can’t help but respond with a genuine nod and smile.

Beyond the fact that she’s stuck in the middle of nowhere, this might not be so bad – at least until her arm heals and she’s back up to prime health to fight her father over this.

 

From: Billy  
Feb. 1, 13:45  
katie save us 

From: Teddy  
Feb. 1, 13:50  
billy’s exaggerating we don’t need to be saved have fun at school

From: Eli  
Feb 1, 21:33  
what is ‘mr sorcerer supreme jr’ saying about me?

From: Tommy  
Feb 3, 23:53  
are there any hot lesbians there?

From: Billy  
Feb 7, 12:21  
if you don’t save us i’m going to blow tony stark

From: Billy  
Feb 7, 12:21  
blow UP wtf autocorrect

From: Billy  
Feb 7, 12:22  
i don’t even know how that happened

From: Billy  
Feb 7, 12:22  
i think that tony stark hacked the mac network to make that happen on all iphones

From: Billy  
Feb 11, 05:14  
save me katie-wan kenobi youre my only hope

From: Tommy  
Feb 12, 22:56  
still waiting on the hot lesbians don’t let me down

 

Kate’s been at the Academy of the Holy Family for three weeks when she sees a group of girls running across a courtyard and into one of the dorms. This is a pretty usual event most days, especially around mealtimes, but for some reason Kate takes particular notice of this event. 

She looks down at her phone and back at the door of the dorm, and heads down from her room. Her roommate (Mara, who, bless her soul, is the biggest fangirl _ever_ , but despite that hasn’t recognized Kate yet – who knew that those glasses she wears as Hawkeye was such a good disguise?) is somewhere in the library cramming for a trig test, so Kate’s on her own as she opens the door to the dorm and sees four girls crammed into a corner, puzzling over a map.

“I told you this was a bad idea,” one of them hisses in a deep, manly baritone.

“I don’t even care anymore, we need to find her and get out of here,” the next one hisses. She has a lovely tenor.

“Hey, there’s no rush. I still need to find hot lesbians,” her twin adds, the tenor matching.

Kate stands behind them, arms crossed over her chest. “You guys are morons,” she says.

It should occur to them to stop hovering over their map and turn around, but instead they keep staring at it for another minute before Teddy finally peeks over at her and stands up straight. “Oh, hello,” Teddy says, his voice feminine and girlish, probably because right now he’s the only one who _is_ a girl. 

The rest of them look up. Eli’s wig is ridiculous, and looks vaguely like something he found in the grandmother’s attic; it’s curly and huge and does nothing for his face, which has makeup slathered on it in hopes of making him look softer, clearly, but instead it just makes him look like a drag queen on speed. “Oh,” he adds thoughtfully. 

Billy and Tommy look more like twins than ever, because their wigs are identical, and in the uniform they don’t actually look so bad, except that Tommy can’t stop fidgeting and Billy’s breasts are crooked. Billy gives Kate a rare smile that screams relief. “Kate!” he says, and throws himself into her arms. “You have to save us, Eli got cranky and made us get up at _four thirty_ and we did pushups for hours and _I need sleep_ or I’ll _unmake Manhattan_.”

“Your breasts are crooked,” is all she can croak in reply to that, her cast going to pat Billy in the back. After an awkward moment in which it takes Teddy and Tommy both to disentangle them (Billy’s got an amazing barnacling ability – really, she should have believed Teddy sooner) she asks, “What are you guys doing here?”

“Breaking you out,” Tommy says. “We’re pros. Well, not Eli,” he says, “but we had to bring him along otherwise he would throw a fit.”

“Also Swarm attacked Times Square again, and I’m pretty sure we had the sloppiest near-loss ever,” Teddy begins, and Eli shoots him a glare, “and lets face it,” he adds, “when you’re about to lose to a Nazi made of bees that you’ve fought like three times, you know you’re missing some crucial element of your team.”

“Whatever,” Tommy quips, “I wanted to see the hot lesbian schoolgirls.”

One of the sisters walks by at just that moment, and all of them stand up a little straighter, and when she passes, Tommy almost giggles. “Oh my god,” he says. “It’s a _real nun._ ”

Kate decides, at that moment, this is enough. Billy’s bosom keeps deflating strangely, and Tommy keeps looking up the banister as if an orgy is about to happen, Eli stares at her with his purple eyeshadowed glare of _god I want to make out with you right now_ , and Teddy is the only one who looks even remotely like he a: belongs there and b: isn’t a boy in some badly written teenage rom-com. “Okay,” she says, “First off, you guys all look stupid, except Teddy, so why didn’t Billy just magic you into gi-“

“Have I mentioned _four thirty am training sessions_ ,” Billy says, pouting manfully. “I don’t have the strength to magic up peanuts, let alone convincingly make us girls for over two hours.”

Kate accepts that with a wave of her hand. “What made you think I needed _breaking out_? Didn’t I tell you guys to wait up? It’s not like I’m in prison.”

Teddy looks vaguely angelic when he says, “I told them you’d be back eventually.”

“Eventually not good enough, Kate,” Eli finally says, weighing in. “We need you now. What if there’s a real emergency? One that doesn’t involve Nazi bees,” he adds as he sees that Billy is clearly about to say something. “This team should be more important than…”

“Than my schooling?” Kate finishes, arching an eyebrow in a way that she knows will reduce Eli to babbling. 

To her surprise, the desperation of dealing with the team without her has made Eli immune, or something. “No! Than letting your father boss you around!”

There’s silence then in the little alcove, and doubtless the rest of the team thinks maybe they should have stayed in New York and let Eli handle this on his own because this is some territory that none of them can define. Kate sure as hell can’t define it, but she feels that familiar stubbornness rise to the surface of her feelings. “I don’t let him boss me around, but in case you didn’t notice, I _broke my arm_ , so I kind of needed to take a break _anyway_.”

“You could have done it in the City,” Eli protests, his voice rising in volume, as usual. Kate doesn’t know how he handles working in a library. He can’t yell at books that refuse to be in order.

“What is this really about, Eli,” she tries, because even though it really might be about the fact that Billy is going to unmake Manhattan and Tommy is going to blow up the moon and Teddy is going to…well, Teddy is probably the least of anyone’s worries right now – Eli is probably venting about something else.

“It’s about the fact that my girlfriend took off with barely a goodbye!”

At the word _girlfriend_ , the other three boys snap to attention. Billy is the first to react, grabbing Teddy’s hand and saying so fast that Kate’s almost convinced that it’s Tommy, “Ohlookatthetimegottago!” and blue light surrounds the two of them.

Just a fraction of a second later, as if he was seeing if he could get away with watching the conversation but realizing that hey, maybe it’s a better idea not to, what with Eli’s face looking like it might start World War Three and Kate’s expression probably no less severe, he books it, something that probably was “Lesbian orgy,” screamed as an excuse.

“Is that why you drove Billy to suicidal levels of exhaustion? Because you knew he would whine and whine until you guys could come up here and see me?” Kate is torn between rage at the stupidity and…an odd sort of affection at the tenderness of the idea. 

Eli’s silence and his furious expression is, in essence, an admission of guilt. “I don’t really think driving our team – and our _friends_ to the point of death was really appropriate,” Kate says, fighting the urge to punch him with her good arm. “Why didn’t you just _come and visit_?”

Because when she says it like that it seems so logical. Kate knows exactly how hard it is, after months and months of ridiculous, non-logical events like assassination attempts and mystical soul twins and Captain America dying and then coming back to life that sometimes real-world logic like _visiting_ suddenly becomes difficult to grasp.

“I thought your dad would have put me on some no-visit list,” Eli mutters, finally, and it’s like the anger in the room deflates. 

Kate reaches over and doesn’t punch him, but instead puts her hand on his face. “I’m about to kiss you in drag,” she says, “and it’s a testament to how much I like you because you look _absolutely hideous_ this way.” 

 

A month later and Kate’s on her way back to the City, because her dad really can’t handle her crying (although there are alligators who are jealous of her tears). She scores an autograph from Cap’ before she leaves and leaves it for her roommate (Cap’ has a soft spot for Kate, especially since she sent him a picture of her in school with a broken arm) and leaves a promise of a summer concert for Sister Mary Catherine.

When she gets home the boys are waiting for her at the base of her building with a sad looking cake and a banner that looks spectacular, so Billy must have made it out of thin air. “You guys are idiots,” she says fondly, her arms around all of them at once, now that both them work. Her sister is probably right – they probably can get her pregnant just by hanging out with her, or something, but it doesn’t matter. 

After the party ends (all downstairs, on the street, because they’re not about to risk getting her sent back for harboring boys in the apartment), Teddy and Billy walk away, hand in hand, Billy looking much better than he looked a month previously (and certainly not because he took his crooked fake breasts off). Tommy mutters, “You owe me hot Catholic lesbians.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” Kate says and kisses him on the cheek, because it’s fun to see Tommy pink up a little, and even more fun to see his smug smile over at Eli, who fumes more than just a little. Tommy raises his eyebrows and zooms off, leaving her and Eli alone, again.

“So,” Kate says, smiling.

“You want to go out for dinner next week,” Eli manages fast, as if he doesn’t say it right away, he’ll lose the nerve.

Kate almost laughs – he’s asked her out once before and that resulted in their date getting hijacked by Clint, and after that he’s always just let their dates happen organically, naturally, and usually, without a label of a ‘date.’ She manages not to laugh, though. “Okay,” she says, and she heads upstairs a moment later, leaving him staring at her from past the doorman’s post.

**Author's Note:**

> I want to add here: all the cross-dressing presented in this fic is meant to be funny because the boys are idiots, not because cross-dressing is inherently comical. Nothing but respect for those who engage in it for fun, pleasure, lifestyle, or any other reason!


End file.
